Ezra Klein

Recap: The productivity of the 111th Congress doesn't weaken the case for Senate reform; a century of efforts to break the filibuster in one graph; and this can't possibly be necessary.

Elsewhere:

1) The Wyden-Gregg recipe for bipartisanship.

2) Speaker Boehner's first act will be to make it easier for the House to increase the deficit.

3) Jon Cohn explains what defunding might mean for the health-care law.

4) I'll be talking filibusters and congressional productivity on the Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell tonight.

5) Tomorrow's a federal holiday, so the blog will be dark. Merry Christmas!

Recipe of the day: In honor of Jewish Christmas, here's my Kung Pao recipe.

Senate Democrats are moving toward some version of filibuster reform. And one of the primary agitators behind that project has been Sen. Jeff Merkley (Ore.). It's his reform proposal -- a modest document that doesn't end the filibuster so much as bring it closer into alignment with what the public already thinks it is -- that many observers think the Democrats will be working off of when they reconvene in early January. We spoke about the issue last week, and an edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Ezra Klein: You're one of the only senators I've seen who's stepped forward and said, "This is one potential route we could take to reform the filibuster." But there's also been some opposition. Chris Dodd devoted his farewell speech to saying that filibuster reform is "unwise." He's obviously been around the Senate for a long time, so what was your take on that?

Jeff Merkley: I did not hear the first half of the speech. I apparently walked in just as he was completing that portion, so I didn't directly react to it. But I think it's important for people to understand that this isn't a question of filibuster or no filibuster, it's about the ability of the minority and the majority to participate in a deliberative process. The filibuster was designed to make sure every member gets to participate and that the minority has a significant role. It wasn't designed to obstruct the deliberative process, and there's nothing about the way that the Senate is operating right now that is consistent with the way the Senate has operated historically.

I always make reference to when I was an intern in '76, and I was working on the Hill in the '80s, the Senate functioned. It doesn't really function now. We didn't pass a budget, we didn't pass any of our appropriations bills. We didn't get to a host of House legislation, we didn't get to a whole lot of nominations to the executive branch and the judicial branch. This is not an acceptable state of affairs.

So if the social contract is broken, the contract that said "I understand that only under the most pressing, important circumstances will I utilize my privilege to delay the Senate and demand a supermajority vote," if that social contract is gone and it's a routine thing because one wants to paralyze the Senate and keep it from operating, then we need to adjust the rules. That doesn't mean we get rid of the filibuster, but it does mean that we should make anyone who wishes to exercise that have to put more energy into it than simply filing an objection and walking away and having dinner while you delay the Senate for a week.

EK: Couldn't somebody say that the reason the budget isn't getting done is that Democrats aren't working with Republicans effectively, that if they gave Republicans more of a chance to be involved from the beginning, if they allowed more open debate and compromised more often, there'd be more bipartisanship? That's certainly the GOP's line, and if you believe it, the idea that the fix for the Senate is to give the majority more power is misguided. Instead, the fix for the Senate is for the majority to stop acting in such a unilateral fashion.

In a post yesterday on the bill extending medical benefits to 9/11 responders, I dismissed Sen. Tom Coburn's argument that the bill hasn't even had a hearing in a committee. But Coburn's office noted that his language was more nuanced, and they've got a case. So here's what Coburn said:

This bill hasn't even been through a committee. We haven't even had the debate on this committee on this bill to know if it's the best thing to do. We haven't even had the testimony.

There was a hearing, and there was testimony. You can watch it here. Coburn didn't attend that hearing, which undercuts his argument. But there wasn't a mark-up of the legislation or a vote in the committee. It was brought straight to the floor. So Coburn was partly right and partly wrong: There was testimony, and you can argue there was debate. But there wasn't the sort of debate you'd get in a mark-up, and the bill didn't go "through" a committee. I don't find this a terribly convincing case against the legislation, but I also don't want to misrepresent it.

Dave Weigel makes the case that though Gov. Chris Christie's personal popularity is dropping, his relentless communications strategy has been successful in making his preferred solutions much more popular than the available alternatives, and in making his chosen opponents much less popular than they'd need to be to mount an effective opposition strategy.

Doug Mataconis looks at my graph on the filibuster and comments:

I hear this a lot, but I don't really understand it.

For one thing, there is a good argument that eliminating the filibuster will make party-line voting less effective for the minority, and thus less common. Whether partisanship still lives in the hearts of minority senators doesn't really worry me. Whether they decide to work with the majority on legislation or continually obstruct it in order to keep the country from being effectively governed does. If obstruction ceases to work, it's not clear why they'd continue to pursue it as pretty much their only strategy. No one likes a perpetually feckless minority. (For a longer version of this case, head here.)

But the broader point is that we don't know how to fix partisanship. It's ebbed and flowed at different times in our polity, and manifested in our legislative institutions in different ways. As Gregory Koger emphasizes in his book on the filibuster, it was the House of Representatives, not the Senate, that first suffered from an overuse of filibuster-like practices, and they were eliminated when the body became unmanageable.

The good news is that we don't need to fix partisanship, which is really nothing more than organized disagreement. All we need to do is ensure that our system can function amid it. There's no great trick to that, as plenty of other countries, the House of Representatives, dinner tables where children want to eat dessert first, and "American Idol" all show. What is dangerous is to allow a system set up for a consensus-based political culture drift into highly polarized political culture. Rules can be changed to fit political realities, but political realities cannot usually be changed to fit rules.

Tomorrow night is Erev Jewish Christmas, the night when Jews begin their annual hunt for Chinese food in honor of the birth of Jesus Christ. But they've got nothing on Jennifer 8. Lee, who went around the world to track down General Tso's chicken:

So long as I'm annoying doctors, I may as well annoy lawyers, too. D. James Greiner and Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak ran a series of controlled experiments to test whether free legal representation really helped claimants who were suing to receive unemployment benefits. "The results are startling," they write. "A service provider’s offer of representation to a claimant had no statistically significant effect on the claimant’s probability of a victory, but the offer caused a delay in the proceeding." Because that meant a delay in benefits, it actually left the claimant worse off. And for you Yalies out there, Maya Sen's spin on this will make you happy:

A basic summary of the results: an offer of free legal representation by an elite cadre of Harvard Law Students does not increase the probability that a client will prevail in his or her claim. (There was a .04 increase in probability of prevailing, not statistically significant.) What the offer of free legal representation does do, however, is increase the delay that clients experience in the adjudication. (The mean time to adjudication for the treated population was 53.1 days versus 37.3 days for the control group, a statistically significant sixteen-day difference.)

This doesn't say much about legal representation in other contexts, but it is interesting. It also reminds me of a story I read earlier today, in perhaps the greatest Wikipedia entry ever:

In common with many misers, [John Elwes] distrusted physicians, preferring to treat himself in order to save paying for one. He once badly cut both legs while walking home in the dark, but would only allow the apothecary to treat one, wagering his fee that the untreated limb would heal first. Elwes won by a fortnight and the doctor had to forfeit his fee.

Expertise isn't always what it's cracked up to be.

(Study via John Sides.)

Last night, Amanda Carpenter, an aide to Sen. Jim DeMint, tweeted a link to this New York Times story and said, "90,000 doctor shortage predicted by 2020. Only 18,600 new docs matriculate per year. Let's welcome docs, not block 'em."

Co-signed! One of the big reasons that health care is so expensive in this country is that doctors make so much money. And one of the reasons that doctors make so much money is that the supply of doctors is artificially constrained. The profession sharply limits the number of doctors who can graduate from medical school each year, and as the New York Times story shows, there's an ongoing effort by the profession to make it harder for foreign-trained doctors to apprentice and then practice in America.

This doesn't make doctors evil. Taxi drivers play this game, and so do barbers, nail salons, and many other professions. And many doctors complain that their high incomes mask crushing student debt. That's true, too. But the fact remains that opening the profession up would make medical care cheaper. And in other countries, where medical practice is less lucrative than it is here, it is still a very desirable profession, and lots of people enter it.

Moreover, as Amanda mentions, we have too few doctors for what we'll need in coming years, and the health-reform law only exacerbates the problem. You could solve that problem by allowing more foreign-trained doctors in, you could do it by making it easier for nurse practitioners to provide primary care, you could do it by increasing the number of people who can enter and graduate from medical school, or you could pick some other path. But at some point, this isn't just something we should do, but something we're going to have to do. America's doctors may be the best in the world, but they're not that great if you can't get in to see them, can't afford to see them or can't get them to spend any real time on your problems because the waiting room is overflowing.

This, however, won't be a bipartisan compromise. The two parties don't want to touch doctors. It could, however, be a left-right compromise: Conservatives should be angry about this distortion of the market, and liberals should be angry about the reduced access and high costs that it causes. Of course, that plus 2.10 will get you a cup of coffee to drink while watching your legislation die in the Senate.

This list of nominees the Senate confirmed before adjourning last night mainly makes clear how insane it is for the Senate to be considering so many nominees. Is there really some pressing reason for Joe Lieberman to weigh in on every member of the Mississippi River Commission? Does Richard Lugar truly have so much to say about the board of directors for the State Justice Institute ("established by Federal law in 1984 to award grants to improve the quality of justice in State courts")? Does the deputy commissioner for Social Security really need to be confirmed by the whole Senate? What are we worried would happen if the Senate merely confirmed his boss?

If you're looking for some good historical data on the filibuster, the fine folks who keep up (the surprisingly useful) Senate.gov site have you covered. They've tracked the number of cloture filings (when the majority begins the process of breaking a filibuster), cloture votes (when they vote to break the filibuster), and clotures (when the majority actually breaks the filibuster) in each Congress since 1919, when the Senate first gave itself the power to break a filibuster. Here's what it all looks like in graph form:

A few things about that graph. First, the rise in filibusters is just shocking. And this doesn't even count all of them. It only counts those filibusters that the majority actually tried to do something about. Plenty more filibusters get threatened, but cloture doesn't get filed because the issue isn't important enough or the votes aren't present.

Second, note how many filibusters get broken. It's not all, but it's a far cry from none (and it's more than you see in this graph, as filibusters that get withdrawn don't end through cloture). Some get broken by overwhelming majorities. But that doesn't mean the filibuster failed. A dedicated filibuster takes about a week to break even if you have the votes. That's a week of wasted time in the Senate. If your preference isn't merely to delay one vote but to threaten the majority with the prospect of getting less done overall, then launching a lot of fruitless filibusters makes perfect sense.

Two of the themes running through my writing recently appear to contradict: How, on the one hand, can I believe we've had the most productive congress in four decades, yet on the other, argue that the past two years show that we need major changes to reduce obstruction in the Senate?

I don't find it that hard, actually. Start with what we actually saw during the past two years: the largest congressional majorities since 1975. A new and popular president. A financial crisis. We had more action than we've seen in a generation because we were, for reasons both electoral and circumstantial, better set up for action than we've been in a generation. That got us a lot of new legislation but also a Congress that has dodged too many hard decisions, proved relentlessly partisan, failed to pass necessary legislation, almost failed to pass most of the major legislation that did get through, and made a slew of bad compromises to attract the necessary votes. It was not, in other words, such a spectacular performance that improvement cannot be imagined.

But that's not the heart of the case. Rather, the real question is this: Going forward, is the danger that we'll do too much, or too little? In recent years, we've seen more procedural obstruction under both parties than at any previous time in the past century. If you believe that the thing to fear is Congress doing too much in the coming decades, that might comfort you. But if you believe the thing to fear is Congress doing too little, it won't.

The latter, I think, is the correct worry. Our problems are on autopilot. Our solutions are not. If we don't do anything, rising health-care costs will leave the government insolvent and the nation poorer. If we don't do anything, our best science says that global warming will wreak havoc on both our country and the planet, and do so in ways that are both unpredictable and potentially irreversible. And somewhat less catastrophically, if we don't do anything, our infrastructure will continue to deteriorate, our immigration system will continue to break down, our education system will continue to tread water.

And if we don't do anything, I'd argue, our political system will continue to disappoint. The polls -- both in the abstract and in the judgments of the lame-duck session -- continue to show that the American people want the two parties to join together to get things done. But the filibuster is a powerful incentive to do just the opposite: It gives the minority the power to make the majority fail at its job, and now that both Democrats and Republicans have realized that kneecapping the other is the quickest way back into power, it's the strategy that they turn to first. The lame-duck session was so productive precisely because the congressional session that preceded it was less productive than a supermajority of members thought it should've been. That's an indictment of the system, not an argument in its favor.

One reader called it 'the Angry Birds' Congress. Majority Leader Harry Reid said it was a "goose on steroids." By the time the 111th gaveled out yesterday, everyone agreed that its final session had been anything but lame. And the rest of the Congress merits that respect, as well. Its frenetic level of activity was enabled by historic majorities (notably in the Senate) and action-inducing events (like the financial crisis), but the rush of legislation it passed, often in difficult circumstances, is testament to Reid and Pelosi's desire and ability to use the majorities they were given. And they did. From health-care reform to financial regulation to food safety to the tax deal to tobacco regulation to the stimulus, the laws they wrote will reshape the safety net, the regulatory state, tax policy, the country's built infrastructure, and much more.

The question now becomes how the 112th Congress will work. The House GOP has already released its rules. They include "CutGo," wherein tax cuts will no longer need to be paid for, a live reading of the Constitution on the House floor, barring former congressmen who now work as lobbyists from the House gym, posting the text of legislation at least 24 hours before it gets considered, and changing the "Committee on Education and Labor" to the "Committee on Education and the Workforce" because, well, the GOP is not so friendly with the labor movement.

It's the Senate, however, where things have taken a surprising turn: All returning Democrats have signed a letter to Reid calling for filibuster reform. That's surprising now, and would've been unthinkable a year ago. What they mean by filibuster reform isn't yet clear -- it's not ending the filibuster, but it could be as much as the full Merkley package, or as little as empowering Reid to negotiate with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell over cloture delays -- but either way, it puts the minority on notice that continued routinization of procedural obstruction won't be met with mere sighs from the majority, but with rule changes that might eventually deprive the minority of those tools. The letter may just be a warning shot, but it could turn into much more if Democrats feel the warning wasn't heeded.

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Every returning Democratic Senator wants to reform the filibuster, reports Dan Friedman: "All Democratic senators returning next year have signed a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., urging him to consider action to change long-sacrosanct filibuster rules. The letter, delivered this week, expresses general frustration with what Democrats consider unprecedented obstruction and asks Reid to take steps to end those abuses. While it does not urge a specific solution, Democrats said it demonstrates increased backing in the majority for a proposal, championed by Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., and others, weaken the minority’s ability to tie the Senate calendar into parliamentary knots. Among the chief revisions that Democrats say will likely be offered: Senators could not initiate a filibuster of a bill before it reaches the floor unless they first muster 40 votes for it, and they would have to remain on the floor to sustain it."

Chalk it up to Mitch McConnell, I argue: "[Democratic] unity stems from an unlikely source: Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has mounted more filibusters in the past two years than occurred in the ’50s and ’60s combined. Uncontroversial bills like an extension of unemployment benefits that passed 97-0 and food-safety legislation that passed with 73 votes frequently faced multiple filibusters and months of delay. The minority has been so relentless and indiscriminate in deploying the once-rare failsafe that the majority has finally decided to do something about it."

The 111th Congress has adjourned, report David Fahrenthold, Philip Rucker, and Felicia Sonmez: "A Congress that was dominated by Democrats passed more landmark legislation than any since the era of Lyndon B. Johnson's 'Great Society.' Congress approved an $814 billion economic stimulus, a massive health-care overhaul, and new regulations on Wall Street trading and consumer credit cards. The list grew longer during this month's frenetic lame-duck session: tax cuts, a nuclear arms treaty and a repeal of the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy on gays in the military. But the 111th Congress will also be remembered for endless filibuster threats, volcanic town hall meetings, and the rise of the tea party. All were symbols of a dissatisfaction that peaked on Nov. 2, with a Republican rout in the midterm elections."

A bill providing health benefit to 9/11 relief workers has finally passed Congress, reports Felicia Sonmez: "After a years-long battle and a bout of last-minute opposition by Senate Republicans, the House on Wednesday passed a bill that would provide $4.2 billion in compensation and long-term health-care benefits for first responders who became ill from working at Ground Zero in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, sending the measure on to President Obama for his signature. The bill passed Wednesday evening by a vote of 206 to 60 after House leaders had held open the vote for more than an hour, presumably for members who were still hustling to make their way over to the Capitol on the final day of the 111th Congress' lame-duck session. Missing Wednesday's vote were nearly 170 House members, 100 more than had been missing in action for the previous day's votes."

The 111th Congress' accomplishments are reflected inthe 112th's main goals, writes E.J. Dionne: "The new Republican House majority is devoted less to a bold agenda of its own than to repealing, scaling back or derailing the accomplishments of the outgoing majority. The fact that wiping out what they call 'Obamacare' is a unifying priority for the conservative newcomers is a backhanded compliment to those who enacted it: Yes, it was a big deal after all, and in the forthcoming debate, reform's supporters will get a second chance to make the case for what they did. Republicans also hope to undercut financial reform, giving the law's supporters the opportunity to explain more clearly why a financial system with loose rules becomes little more than a casino operated by people in much nicer suits than those worn by the average croupier."

Got tips, additions, or comments? E-mail me.

Indie pop interlude: First Rate People's "Girls' Night".

Still to come: Merrill Lynch spent two years selling itself toxic assets; Medicare is declining to use its own databases to police fraud; George Will sees common ground between President Obama and Rep. Dave Camp; a bill to protect whistleblowers failed in the Senate; the US is challenging China at the WTO on wind power; and a cat is deeply confused by his own reflection.

Recap: Why the lame-duck session has been so productive; Mitch McConnell says the darndest things; and every Senate Democrat supports filibuster reform.

Elsewhere:

1) A history of the word "austerity," which has just been named Merriam-Webster's word of the year.

2) A smart take on the Census.

3) Another smart take on the Census.

4) I'll be talking lame-duck session -- or "Angry Birds session," depending on your point of view -- on the Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell tonight.

The president said a couple of things during his press conference that are worth pulling out. First, on the continuing resolution:

I’m also disappointed we weren’t able to come together around a budget to fund our government over the long term. I expect we’ll have a robust debate about this when we return from the holidays -- a debate that will have to answer an increasingly urgent question -- and that is how do we cut spending that we don’t need while making investments that we do need -- investments in education, research and development, innovation, and the things that are essential to grow our economy over the long run, create jobs, and compete with every other nation in the world.

He doesn't say anything about the inadequate budgets for implementing financial reform and health-care reform. But he does preview a "robust debate" in which his position, and presumably the Democrats' position, will be that that deficit reduction needs to be paired with necessary investments. As readers know, I think that's the right position.

Later in the conference, Jake Tapper asked if it really makes sense to allow gay soldiers to serve openly, but not to marry. The wording of President Obama's reply was interesting:

They say elections have consequences. So too, it turns out, does obstruction. In a move that's as overdue as it is unexpected, every returning Senate Democrat has signed a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid calling for filibuster reform.

The letter is not specific on what sort of reform they'd like to see, but the basic outline looks to take its cues from Sen. Jeff Merkley's proposal: Filibusters would require continuous debate on the floor of the Senate, and they would only be allowed once the bill is on the floor (no more filibustering the motion to debate a bill, for instance). Democrats would also like to see the dead time between calling for a vote to break a filibuster and actually taking the vote reduced. “There need to be changes to the rules to allow filibusters to be conducted by people who actually want to block legislation instead of people being able to quietly say ‘I object’ and go home,” Sen. Claire McCaskill told the National Journal.

None of these changes would reverse the Senate's transformation into a 60-vote institution, of course. Instead, they would speed up and streamline what happens around those votes. While many Americans understand that you need 60 votes to break a filibuster, relatively few realize that you need about a week of floor time on the Senate to even take those votes -- and the minority has been quick to understand that time is precious in the modern Senate, and so the mere threat of a filibuster on less-pressing items like nominations is enough to stop them cold. It's not that Reid doesn't have 60 votes to break the filibuster, but that he doesn't have a week to spend doing it.

It's no surprise that some Senate Democrats want to see the practice reworked. What's remarkable is that all Senate Democrats want to see it reworked. It's not just the young senators like Jeff Merkley and Tom Udall and Michael Bennett, but the older veterans like Barbara Mikulski and Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin.

Their unity stems from an unlikely source: Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has mounted more filibusters in the past two years than occurred in the ’50s and ’60s combined. Uncontroversial bills like an extension of unemployment benefits that passed 97-0 and food-safety legislation that passed with 73 votes frequently faced multiple filibusters and months of delay. The minority has been so relentless and indiscriminate in deploying the once-rare failsafe that the majority has finally decided to do something about it.

They may not do much -- at least this year. But even doing a little matters. It puts the minority on notice that the filibuster is not sacrosanct. Having reformed it once, Democrats -- and, of course, Republicans, when they retake the majority -- can reform it again. There is nothing novel about that: In 1917, the Senate voted to allow 67 senators to break a filibuster, and in 1975, the Senate voted to bring that down to 60. Sen. Tom Udall, who's been at the center of the efforts to convince the Senate to begin updating its rulebook with each new Congress, has argued that this knowledge will make both the majority and the minority act more responsibly in the future, as they'll labor under the knowledge that misuse of the rules will mean reform of the rules. If Democrats don't lose their nerve, we'll soon find out whether he's right.

The bill extending medical benefits to 9/11 responders passed today. It had been held up because, well, it's not exactly clear.

At one point, Sen. Tom Coburn said the problem was the bill hadn't had a hearing in committee. That was untrue: It had been heard and passed through the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee -- the very committee Coburn sits on. It turned out he just hadn't shown up to the hearing.

At other times, Coburn said that the problem was that the bill wasn't paid for. That also wasn't true: The bill was fully offset by closing a tax break for foreign corporations that operated in the United States. Coburn had also supported the unpaid-for extension of the Bush tax cuts under the theory that "It’s not a cost. That’s where we are today. That’s the baseline. It doesn’t score anything to continue them." None of that is true, incidentally. The budget baseline does not include the extension of the Bush tax cuts, and so they score as a cost.

Coburn eventually released a "detailed outline" on his opposition to the legislation. It's detailed, but it's not particularly persuasive. It really just throws a lot of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Coburn argues, for instance, that "government health care benefits crowd-out private benefits. Private plans will have incentive to drop coverage for procedures and health care entities in which enrolled patients can receive benefits through the 9/11 program." The idea that "crowd-out" would be a problem when you're dealing with a population as small and unique as 9/11 responders is laughable. Coburn's document also relied on his office's calculations of the bill's cost ($10.4 billion), rather than the Congressional Budget Office's ($7 billion).

The bill finally did pass, but only once Democrats shaved it from $7 billion in benefits to $4.3 billion in benefits. It's quite a place for the GOP, which just fought to extend $700 billion in tax cuts for the rich, to begin cutting back. To get a sense of the people and problems we're talking about here, watch this interview Chris Hayes conducted with a 9/11 responder who subsequently lost 30 percent of his lung capacity due to inhalation of particulates at Ground Zero:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

House Republicans have announced plans to read the Constitution aloud on the House floor on second day of the new Congress. As Jonathan Bernstein says, "it's well known that the Constitution is clear and unambiguous at all points, and that previous violations of it have been caused by a combination of ignorance and indifference. Once it's read on the House floor, that problem will be solved." But why stop with the Constitution?

To be safe, I'd recommend reading the rules of the 111th House; the new rules proposed by the incoming majority; and the final result, after it passes, of the official rules of the 112th House. While they're at it, they might as well read Robert's Rules of Order.

That's not all! I know Republicans have been quite concerned about the nefarious Democratic practice of passing bills they have not read in full, based on the belief that only a full reading of the text of the bill will reveal its true meaning. Therefore, I'd highly recommend that the House reject the corrupt Democratic practice of dispensing with the full reading of the bill, and commence full readings. Before they're referred to committee. Every bill.

Moreover, the Constitution, while obviously directly Divinely inspired, does have the sad drawback of not making that inspiration quite as explicit as we'd like it to be. A true People's House would, therefore, not stop with reading the Constitution, but plunge right in to the Declaration of Independence, paying special attention to the parts about "nature's God" and "endowed by their Creator." And the good bits in the last paragraph, too.

To be on the safe side, I'd also say that it can't hurt to read the Federalist Papers out loud on the House floor. And Tom Paine's Common Sense. I was going to say they should add Longfellow's poem, but I heard a rumor that it was subversive, so forget that one.

And...yes, everyone but a few radicals in Berkeley, Madison, and Cambridge knows that true legitimate authority is directly based on God, so I'd very much expect House Republicans to insist on a full reading of the Christian Bible on the House floor.

Anything he missed?

Over e-mail, a reader directed my attention to an interesting tidbit from the Census: Washington, D.C., now has 601,723 residents. Wyoming has 563,626. And yet Wyoming has two senators and a congressman, all of whom have the full suite of powers and responsibilities that their position suggests. D.C.'s representatives, of course, remain powerless. This is also something that the 111th Congress should've fixed but didn't.

Correction: On Twitter, I implied that D.C. being more populous than Wyoming is a new phenomenon. As Tim Carney noted over e-mail, D.C. has long been more populous than Wyoming. He even made a graph:

That's what Aleidy thinks this lame-duck session should be renamed, considering how un-lame it turned out to be. I like it. If you don't get the reference, head here.

President Obama:

In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Wednesday, 56 percent of Americans said they support how Obama has handled the lame-duck session that’s expected to end this week. Forty-one percent said they disapprove.

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle didn't do as well. Republicans have a 42 percent approval rating for their work during the lame duck, while 44 percent approved of the work by Democrats.

Obama's lead in the poll might just be a function of his continual lead over Congress in all polls. It's also worth noting that Congress is above 40 percent in this survey, which just about never happens. It's almost as if the American people like it when their legislators actually get things done...

Sheryl Sandberg, former chief of staff to Larry Summers and current COO of Facebook, looks at why we don't have more female executives, and what can be done about it:

James Fallows had a thoughtful post explaining why he doesn't have a comment section, which he then followed with an offer -- quickly retracted -- to try out a moderated comments section. Across my, err, RSS feed, Brad DeLong said that it is time for him to begin moderating his comment section. "I regret this," he wrote. "It is a defeat."

I receive a lot of requests to moderate my comment section, and I see the argument for it: Moderated comment sections are tend to be of higher quality over time, particularly when the moderator puts time and energy into fostering the discussion. The problem is that it's about all I can do to produce content for this blog. My understanding from the Washington Post overlords is that 2011 should bring some long-overdue upgrades to our commenting software, so hopefully that'll help a bit. And if there are things I can do that would have a high pay-off but a low time-cost, I'm willing to do them.

I also want to emphasize that comments aren't the only, or even the best, way to communicate with me directly: I do try to read the comments, but I don't get to all of them. If you've written something you really want me to see -- either because you believe I got something wrong, or you have something to add, or it's just a comment you spent a lot of time on -- please e-mail it to me. The best e-mail to use is wonkbook@gmail.com. I don't reply to everything I get, but I do read it all. And in the new year, I'd like to post more of your e-mailed thoughts on the blog, along the lines of what Andrew Sullivan and James Fallows do.

But for those of who do comment, what would you like to see in the comment section? And for those of who'd like to comment but don't, same question. I'd like to try and foster the commenting community in 2011, but I'm not exactly sure how to do it.

I'm not single anymore, but back when I was, I found the idea of "playing hard to get" fairly confusing. The people I knew who had the most success in the dating world seemed to be the best at conveying interest, which in turn appeared to make potential partners more willing show interest back. And that made sense: If you assume that one of the major preferences people have is not to be rejected, then making it clear that they won't be rejected should smooth the path forward. But that was just my theory. This, however, is a peer-reviewed paper testing it. And it turns out I was semi-wrong:

This research qualifies a social psychological truism: that people like others who like them (the reciprocity principle). College women viewed the Facebook profiles of four male students who had previously seen their profiles. They were told that the men (a) liked them a lot, (b) liked them only an average amount, or (c) liked them either a lot or an average amount (uncertain condition). Comparison of the first two conditions yielded results consistent with the reciprocity principle. Participants were more attracted to men who liked them a lot than to men who liked them an average amount. Results for the uncertain condition, however, were consistent with research on the pleasures of uncertainty. Participants in the uncertain condition were most attracted to the men -- even more attracted than were participants who were told that the men liked them a lot. Uncertain participants reported thinking about the men the most, and this increased their attraction toward the men.

So then the best strategy is playing hard to get, which is to say, creating "the uncertain condition." But if you're not going to do that, then it's better to be very clear that you like someone rather than merely hinting around at it.

Not according to Gallup:

If anything, he looks to have lost some ground among self-described independents. He's also lost about eight points among liberals in recent months, though gained about as much among moderate Republicans. That may not be a good trade-off, however, as there are probably more votes for the White House among enthused liberals than among slightly-less-angry moderate Republicans.

Overall, Obama's approval rating is holding steady at 46 percent.

So far, the lame-duck session has managed to pass an $850 billion tax-cuts-and-stimulus deal, the repeal of DADT, the Defense Authorization bill, a continuing resolution to keep funding the federal government, the START treaty, the food-safety bill, and probably a few more pieces of legislation I'm forgetting.

This is vastly more than anyone expected, and even if I'm disappointed by the failure of the omnibus spending bill (for reasons explained here) and the DREAM act, I can see why Sen. Lindsey Graham summed up the session by saying, "When it's all going to be said and done, Harry Reid has eaten our lunch."

But it wasn't really Harry Reid who ate their lunch (and how much better would that quote have been if Graham had said, "Harry Reid drank our milkshake"?). It was the Republicans. DADT repeal passed because Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Scott Brown voted with the Democrats. The tax deal went through because a host of Republicans voted with the Democrats. Same for START, the food-safety bill and the DoD authorization. If the bill helping 9/11 responders get medical benefits passes, that too will be because of Republican support.

The question is why the Republicans didn't just drag their feet and let things expire and then come back to everything in 2011, when they'll have more allies in the Senate and control of the House? As Graham said, "with a new group of Republicans coming in, we could get a better deal on almost everything."

The answer, I think, is that there are plenty of Senate Republicans who aren't too comfortable with the class of conservatives who got elected in 2010. These legislators knew they had to stick with McConnell before the election, as you can't win back the majority by handing the president lots of legislative accomplishments. But now that the election was over, the bills that had piled up were, in many cases, good bills, and if they didn't pass now, it wasn't clear that they'd be able to pass later.

The incumbent -- and the outgoing -- Republicans know that the fact that Republicans will have more power in 2011 doesn't necessarily mean that they'll use that power to pass sensible legislation. So those of them who wanted to pass sensible legislation decided to get it all done now, even if that meant handing Reid and Obama a slew of apparent victories in the lame-duck session.